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World leaders will need to present compelling evidence for attacks

Tony Jones
Thu Aug 29 23:19:00 EST 2013

Michael Singh the Managing Director of the Washington Institute and a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council discusses the situation in Syria and the options for international intervention. He says governments will need to reveal convincing evidence to justify taking action against Syria.

Transcript

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: To discuss the situation in Syria and the options for international intervention, we're joined from our Washington bureau by Michael Singh, the managing director of the Washington Institute, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council. He previously served as special assistant to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

Michael Singh, thanks for joining us.

MICHAEL SINGH, MD, WASHINGTON INSTITUTE: Thank you.

TONY JONES: Now, will the US go public with the evidence that it has or that has convinced President Obama, among others, that the Assad regime is definitely responsible for these horrific chemical weapons attacks?

MICHAEL SINGH: I think they'll have no choice. I think that the US Government, as well as the British Government and others governments will have to publicly share what information has led them to conclude that the regime is responsible for these attacks in Syria because of course the entire justification for military action is based upon punishing and deterring chemical weapons attacks.

TONY JONES: Do you have any idea what evidence they have? I mean, they're talking about intelligence evidence. There've been a few reports of what that intelligence evidence might include. Do you know?

MICHAEL SINGH: You know, I don't know and it's not clear how much can be released. So far what we've seen is basically a conclusion that the public evidence so far, the open-source evidence, we might say, is compelling and points to chemical weapons and that only the regime possesses the types of weapons necessary to deliver those types of weapons in the way that they seem to have been delivered. Now, that may or may not be compelling, again based upon one's level of scepticism, but I think that what the administration here hopes, what Prime Minister Cameron hopes in London is that this'll be sufficient to sort of get over that hurdle of scepticism.

TONY JONES: The most compelling report that we've seen is in foreign policy where a journalist is quoting US intelligence officials talking about an intercepted phone call or phone calls between a Syrian Defence official and some sort of military officer in charge of a chemical weapons unit after the attack. Do you know anything about that?

MICHAEL SINGH: I don't have any information on that, and again, there's obviously a very difficult decision to be made if you've got classified information as to whether you should release that. Also unclear as to how compelling that will be, because of course remember every one has in the back of their minds the Iraq experience. You have President Obama, who himself was a very severe critic of what happened in Iraq. And so in many ways I think people will not necessarily be automatically swayed just by saying, well, this is intelligence. I think there's going to need to be a sort of compelling and logical case if you're going to base this on the notion that the regime used chemical weapons.

TONY JONES: Yes, well you would have seen that I imagine when you were working with Colin Powell, the dilemma that he had when having to go before the United Nations to present so-called evidence, much of which turned out to be bogus.

MICHAEL SINGH: And I think - look, the difficulty you face here is that there is a certain odd quality to what's being presented here: the notion that we are not going to really become involved in this conflict in an effort to, say, resolve it, but we're somehow simply going to police the way the conflict is waged, if you know what I mean, as though we're sort of football referees in a sense. And I think that given that you had 100,000 people already killed, something that President Obama acknowledged for example in his remarks yesterday, given that there have been so many atrocities, again, it's - I think for many people it's confusing as to why now we believe that it's necessary to punish this and then simply go away in a sense.

TONY JONES: So, do you believe that in order to convince the world that a military strike - and there does seem to be an accelerating momentum towards having military strikes against Syria as punishment for the use of chemical weapons - do you believe they will be forced to delve into their intelligence and bring it out into the public, whether the public are sceptical about it or not?

MICHAEL SINGH: Well I think you have to make a compelling presentation. I think that - whatever that means. Whether that means sort of bringing up some of the - rather declassifying, let's say, some of the intelligence. But I think mostly you have to have a sort of narrative which people will accept. But I think that before we delve too much into that, it's important that we ask ourselves: do we have a clear objective? Are the means that we're talking about sufficient to accomplish that objective? And are we perhaps focusing too much on only the military angle here? You don't hear, for example, a diplomatic strategy with respect to Syria. You don't hear much of a political strategy. And I think one of the mistakes that we shouldn't repeat here is focusing too much on the military angle and not enough on those other angles.

TONY JONES: Well, did President Obama box himself in in a sense when he talked about the use of chemical weapons crossing a red line beyond which he would pretty much be forced to take action?

MICHAEL SINGH: Well I think that's true. By setting down that red line now, there is a strong element of credibility being at stake here. But again, I think that there's a broader problem here, which is that you've heard Western officials, both American as well as officials in Europe and Australia talk about the threat that Syria poses to our strategic interests. This is in many ways a sort of regional war and yet we have been almost entirely absent. And so that is really in a sense the fundamental problem, is that there's a disconnect between the conversation we're having now and our sort of indifference previously to everything that's been going on there.

TONY JONES: Well, yeah, that is certainly reflected in what the White House spokesman is saying because he's insisting that if there is military action, it won't be about trying to force regime change, in spite of the fact the President says there should be regime change in Syria, it'll simply be about punishing the Syrians - the Syrian authorities for actually using chemical weapons. Now to limit things in that way, does that limit your options down the track or does it in fact draw you in to a broader conflict if you do take that action?

MICHAEL SINGH: Well there is the possibility of being drawn into the larger conflict and I think the real risk there is that you could be drawn in in a way that is unsuccessful. Unless you start with the right objective and the right strategy to achieve it, simply a process of piecemeal escalation is unlikely to result in any satisfactory conclusion. I think the other danger here is that we risk giving the impression that we are really no longer in a sense a major player in the Middle East or committed to advancing our interests or our friends' interests in the Middle East and that will have reverberations for us in this region, for our standing in this region and our influence in this region I think for a long time to come.

TONY JONES: Now there very - there are a few practical issues, one of which is the fact that there are chemical weapons inspectors on the ground supposedly still being given access to the area where these chemical attacks took place. I mean, should that entire thing be resolved before there is any move to military action?

MICHAEL SINGH: Well I think that this is tied to sort of the - the political strategy in the various capitals. I think that to make the right kind of presentation to legislatures, to our Congress here, to Parliament in London, to make the right kind of case to the public, some of those leaders will want to have in hand some kind of report from the weapons inspectors. And of course the Western countries won't want to engage in any kind of strikes with those inspectors on the ground, which may account for the fact that the regime has now asked those inspectors to stay longer. So I do think that there's an element here of some almost inevitable delay.

TONY JONES: And yet you're getting mixed messages from Washington because once again the White House spokesman says their work is redundant. We know it was a chemical attack, we know the Government or the regime did it, so their work is redundant.

MICHAEL SINGH: Well and I think that's accounted for by the fact that the inspectors are not expected to say who is responsible for any chemical weapons usage, only to say whether or not chemical weapons were used. And so I think the White House doesn't want that inspection report to really be the only thing that people focus on. I think they want people to focus on the broader evidence which they have introduced and will introduce presumably more of and not simply the UN report because there will be a sort of tendency in some capitals to really just look solely at the UN report as legitimising or not legitimising action.

TONY JONES: Now you're making a series of very sensible claims, but there's a certain inevitability to these things sometimes and of course the Pentagon is right now drawing up a target list in Syria and preparing themselves for the possibility of getting that order, which of course they have to do. If they do go ahead with limited strikes, what would they be against? What would they hit?

MICHAEL SINGH: Well, you know, General Dempsey, who's our sort of top military chief here in the United States, gave a sense of this in testimony which he gave to our Congress earlier. He talked about the fact that you might have strikes against sort of high-level regime military targets, regime military capabilities, rather than necessarily just, say, chemical weapons stocks themselves because preventing the future use of chemical weapons isn't simply about the stocks of those weapons themselves, but about the means to deliver them against the civilian population. And so, what you've heard the administration talking about is not just deterrence but degrading the regime's military capabilities. And so I would think that just about any military targets would be sort of fair game in these types of limited strikes, but I think that that would be still of quite a narrow scope and a very short duration to listen to what officials are saying.

TONY JONES: Yeah, well the New York Times is talking about the military units responsible, their headquarters, missile launchers, artillery batteries and possibly air bases where attack helicopters take off. Are those - is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

MICHAEL SINGH: I think that is quite legitimate. I would just say the thing you need to keep in mind is you need to make sure again: what is the objective? What are you hoping to have accomplished at the end of your military campaign? I would say that simply punishment really can't be enough. I think that's not a serious enough objective for the use of external military force in this type of situation. So if you're going to go in and use military force, you need to think where - what's the sort of end game here? Where will this have left the situation there? And you want to make sure you leave things in a better place than you start, rather than simply doing something for the sake of doing something. And again, I would say the targets need to be picked with that in mind, but also, again, you need to have other elements of a strategy here.

TONY JONES: Yeah. So if the strategy or the basis for it is the responsibility to protect doctrine and indeed we know that hundreds of thousands of civilians - or at least 100,000 civilians have already been killed. Why not attack and destroy, for example, the entire Syrian Air Force on the ground and prevent them from taking off and do what the rebels are asking for, put a no-fly zone over Syria? Why not take that kind of action?

MICHAEL SINGH: Well, look, in terms of the premise, it's hard to see the premise here as really being responsibility to protect, because obviously, as you said, there have been 100,000 or more people killed in this conflict, over four million refugees generated by this conflict, and there's no real plan or intent, I think, to address that mass humanitarian effect. I think instead we see our Western countries wanting to defend this so-called international norm against chemical weapons usage, against this particular type of weapon, and so I think the military action will be geared to that. But, look, if you had a very different objective in mind; if your objective was to really resolve the conflict, which is I think what you would need to do to stop all of these various spillover effect; not just the refugees and the deaths, but the spillover into Lebanon which your program was referencing earlier, then I think you would have a different strategy and I think that would certainly look at more severely degrading the military capabilities of the regime, but also strengthening the sort of moderate or secular opposition in a way that the two parties could actually sit with one another across a negotiating table.

TONY JONES: Well we presume that the President is being presented with a series of war plans and indeed the templates for the kind of action that you're referring to there are already there. There was Libya of course and before that many years earlier in Kosovo. Both of those examples are being talked about as what the US could do if it had the will to do it. Do you think they ever will?

MICHAEL SINGH: Well I think that if you listen to President Obama's interview last night, he clearly dismissed the idea of a more ambitious objective in Syria. He said that US military involvement would not help resolve the conflict. He said he hopes a political solution can be reached, but he made pretty clear that he didn't see a role for Western military action or a more aggressive Western strategy in accomplishing that. He referenced, for example, Iraq and avoiding a repetition of that, which tells you that he's looking to do something much more modest here. And so I think in many was the objective here has been set. It's a quite narrow objective and the desire is to be in and out quite quickly. And so whatever war plans are generated will be of course sort of keyed to the objectives set by the Commander-in-Chief, which is our President here.

TONY JONES: Michael Singh, we're out of time, I'm afraid. We could talk a lot longer about this. We can't do that tonight. We thank you very much for coming to join us.